In last week’s post, I discussed the three role stressors that cause the most damage to employee performance and overall well-being. Of those, role ambiguity had the most damaging effects; it’s also the one that you’ll find most often when you look throughout any organization. Put simply, role ambiguity happens when an employee is unclear on what’s expected of them in their role.

Role ambiguity is caused by a lack of critical information, and it occurs when an employee doesn’t know what to do, how to do it, or how their performance will be judged. This uncertainty creates a lot of stress for employees who are expected to do something for which they have no clear understanding of what success looks like.

Lucky for us, role ambiguity is the one role stressor that an individual leader can manage and control better than the other two. Role ambiguity arises when expectations are unclear. Leaders set expectations. An individual’s leader is the one person who can help alleviate role ambiguity, and through proper task assignments, leaders can avoid role ambiguity from the onset.

Here’s a list of questions you could think through before assigning a task:

This is not a prescriptive or exhaustive list, but it is meant to provide you with an idea of all the critical information your employee might need to complete the task autonomously. I’ve found many leaders assign tasks without this level of detail, and when they do, it almost always leads to more problems down the line.

For example, you tell a subordinate manager to improve team performance. They agree with you and say, I will work on improving team performance. Six months go by, and they come back to you and say, I’ve reduced voluntary turnover by 10% and increased our semi-annual engagement scores. You’re frustrated because the team’s outputs have not increased over the six-month span. In your eyes, team performance hasn’t improved, but your subordinate manager reports massive team performance improvements.

So what went wrong?

An ambiguous task was given without specific details and clarity around what success looks like. Both sides felt aligned, but the manager never clarified what “improve team performance” actually means. The subordinate never asked what it meant, either. Clarity arises once we ask questions and spend time discussing our own views on the questions and the task being assigned.

Far too often, leaders give ambiguous tasks and then get frustrated when the deliverable is off after waiting for it for months. When this happens, most leaders default to taking more control, more ownership, and more oversight. They might even give their employee a poor performance rating and begin putting them on a performance improvement plan.

But what hardly ever happens is the leader taking ownership of the failure and going back to first principles with the question: What could I have done to produce a better outcome?

Asking this question should immediately trigger the manager to think through their poor task assignment. What if I assigned this task better by providing more details and clarity on what the end state should look like? Improved team performance means greater outputs in line with the company's expectations, while maintaining or improving turnover and engagement metrics. This isn’t even the full task assignment outlined above (answering all seven questions), and you can see how much closer the subordinate manager would have been to achieving success in the eyes of their manager.

Role ambiguity is almost always caused by the leader, and it can always be solved by the leader. It’s your job as a leader to assign your employees clear tasks they can execute autonomously. So, next time your employee delivers something that misses the mark, ask yourself if you provided enough clarity with your task assignment.

Until next time,

Rick

P.S. You can also use the questions above to ask your boss for more clarity on your own work assignments. It works both ways!